Take 2

I’ve been meaning to write a review on some hardware I’ve purchased lately and some stores that I’ve shopped at.  This marks the first of those such reviews.  This one focuses on the Seagate ST3320620AS 320GB hard drive.  Bottom line first, this is the best hard disk I’ve ever owned.

My computer purchases have been revolving around quiet and cool components.  The ST3320620AS fits the bill nicely.  It’s just a great drive.  The noise output is lower than almost any drive that I’ve owned.  It pairs superbly with my Antec P180 case.

I’ve run hdparm to benchmark it on both a intel ICH7 and Silicon Image 3132 chipsets.  The results were pretty much the same.  The drive will give 75MBP/s throughput on reads and writes.  That also makes it the fastest drive I own.   My next hardware purchase will most likely be 4 ST3320620NS drives for my server box.

Yes it’s possible to steal internet from an airport by using MAC address spoofing.  You’re reading the proof.  I also proxied the connection through an ssh tunnel.  So l33t.

The Lions went 3-13 this year.  I was a little off on the 4-12 prediction…

I just finished off adding a chat app to the supersled.net site.   This was done using the pretty-good x7chat application.  The phpbb authentication integration of the app works great.  I only had to modify one file to point it to the location of phpbb’s config file.

I never knew why projects like zope existed until now.  It really makes sense to have a web site, expecially a community based one, built atop of a common framework.  With a common framework, things like chat can be added fairly easily and without worry of the parent application changing and breaking something.

I am planning on upgrading to phpbb3 when it comes out or shortly after.   With drupal, phpbb, and x7chat on the same site, things may get a little hairy.

I finally put up my last computer (version 4) up on ebay. It had been replaced by the core2 box (version 5). Here’s the listing. Twas a sweet box. The best I’ve ever worked on till I built core2. It’s weird to feel a little bit of attachment to a computer, but I sure spent a lot of time working on the thing. It’s hard to put so much effort into picking out just the right setup and then just ship it off two years later. Such is the nature of technology.
I will have to write a page on the evolution of my desktop systems someday. I wouldn’t like to forget where I’ve come from and accomplished with them.